​They say any element heavier than Hydrogen was made in a star.  Hydrogen fuses into Helium.  And that fuses to form heavier elements.  The heavier stuff will be found towards the center of a star, like metals.  Gold, Silver, platinum and the less precious stuff, are forged in the cosmic furnaces.  When a star dies, the elements are scattered.  Our planet is made with the remains of dead stars.  People are fond of pointing out that we are made of stardust.  I was thinking about that this week.  I have been avoiding the beagle club with Covid-19, and letting the old timers have the club running grounds.  I am constantly officiating funerals with lots of people being exposed to me, the last thing I want to do is give a virus to an older club member.  So, I have been running in the wild.  Everyone who has hunted with Andy Purnell will tell you that they know his secret spots, but I actually do.  I have been in those spots a lot, the ones that are safe—some are prone to rattlesnakes before winter.
            Andy and I would run dogs and chat.  Some spots we would just train dogs, no hunting, just to make sure that no one else found them by following us in hunting season.  Sometimes, we would run a place so much that we would know particular rabbits, the same as when you get a bunny in a beagle club that tends to run the same pattern every time you find it.
            “That rabbit is familiar,” I said, listening to the dogs one day in November.
            “The third circle will cross the fork of the dirt road, running over that flat rock,” Andy said.
            “Yep.”
            “We shouldn’t shoot it until the third circle,” Andy said.
            “You want to get it?” I asked.
            “Why?” he shrugged.
            “I know you like staying on the paths.”
            “For a guy that gets in the brush as much as you,” Andy puffed on his pipe, “You should be a judge.”
            “I aint a fast enough runner,” I said.
            “Fast enough,” he smiled.
            “I don’t know enough about dogs to evaluate them,” I protested.
            “I won’t disagree with you there,” he laughed.
            “Go stand at the Y in the road,” I said, walking away.
            “Where you going?” he yelled.
            “Don’t you worry,” I said, and headed for a patch of greenbrier.  I heard Andy laughing.  He knew I was headed to a spot the rabbit would go on the fourth circle.
            BOOM! I heard Andy’s .410 pistol bark.  “Son of a b---” Andy yelled. The rabbit ran right to me.  I dropped it, with one shot from my double barrel.
            “Well,” Andy yelled, “You only shot once, so you must have got it.”
            “I always get it,” I said, “I get at the edge of the brush.  They are moving slower.”
            “They are only slower in front of your dogs!” he yelled back, “Mine are here too!  You must have gotten lucky!”
            We ran another rabbit, guns unloaded, sitting on a log until it was time for him to go to work at Lion Country Supply, and for me to do hospital visits.  That was a few months before Andy died, from cardiac failure.  I was at that Y in the road recently, running a rabbit that runs remarkably similar to the one I shot that day, years ago.  I won’t shoot him this fall, if he makes it that far. I was thinking about stardust as the rabbit passed me. Why?
            When Andy died, the town where the funeral was held was jammed full of pickup trucks with dog boxes in the bed.  They lined the streets, like a parade was going to start.  The funeral was standing room only as I walked in, an hour before the service started.
            “Can I get his wedding ring?” Andy’s widow, Lisa, asked me.  Andy had been cremated.
            “I will get it,” I said and walked to the funeral director and asked him.
            “What ring?” the funeral director asked.
            “His wedding band,” I said.  He looked nervous.  The funeral director that worked for him walked towards the back, closing the door behind her. I walked back to the urn with the ashes, where Lisa was greeting people. “They are getting it,” I said.  A few minutes later the guy approached.
            “They didn’t give us the ring,” He said, “The State Police probably have it.”  That sounded odd to me.  I pushed the idea aside, getting ready to officiate the service.  It was going to be tough to do without getting emotional.  When I am at a funeral for someone close to me, I keep a memory of a time when the deceased made me angry ready to think about if I get too sad to keep speaking.  I pause, and the memory pops into my head to help me settle.  If that doesn’t work, I bite the inside of my cheek.  I bit my cheek pretty hard to get through that funeral.
            The next day, I called a state trooper I know and asked why the police would have the wedding band.  He told me that would not happen.  I told Lisa to call the coroner.  She got a copy of the coroner’s report, and it said that the ring was taped to Andy’s hand, and the clothes he was wearing were there too, with the body.  I thought it was possible that the guy stole the ring, an odd thing.
            Lisa called my cell phone, “Hello,” I answered.
            “I scheduled a meeting with that funeral director,” she said.
            “Good idea,” I said.
            “Will you take me?”
            “Yeah,” I said, “Sure.”
            “Good,” she said, “I am afraid that I will get mad. You need to keep me calm.”
            “No problem,” I said.
            I know a lot of pastors and funeral directors.  I did some calling.  I am told that the guy was previously in legal trouble that got him in enough trouble that he can own a funeral home but he has another worker doing the work.  I was also told that he once beat his wife on main street.  I can’t prove that these things are true, and I didn’t try to confirm them.  But his peers and my colleagues said it was the case.
            It was cold and snowy when we met him.  Tiny, powdery snowflakes, that he was shoveling as we arrived.  A broom would work better.  Into the office we went, he sat behind his desk, Lisa and I sat on the opposite side.
            “Did you find the ring?” Lisa asked.
“It never arrived here,” he leaned back in his chair like we were discussing a ball game or pizza.
            “It had to,” I said.
            He dialed a number, his desk phone on speaker mode.  One ring, and an answer “Hello?”
            “Yes,” the guy put a foot on his desk, “I am here with the Purnell family.”  He didn’t recognize me as the officiating pastor a week earlier.  He thought I was a relative.
            “Oh yeah,” the guy on the other end said.
            “Yes,” he slouched in his office chair, “You told me that there was no ring on the body when you did the cremation, right?”
            “That is correct,” the voice asserted.
            “Okay,” he put both feet back on the desk, “Goodbye.”
            “What does that prove?” Lisa asked.
            “The ring never made it here,” he said.
            “We contacted the coroner,” I said, “You’re a liar.”  I was wondering what pawn shops I had to seek to get the ring back.
            “You can’t talk to me like that!” he stood and was shouting.  Lisa began to cry,
            I stood.  And in a very calm voice I said, “You better calm down.  Because if you plan on going in this direction, I will give you a hell of a lot more trouble on main street than your wife did.” I shoved his desk towards him. He sat down and rolled his chair backwards. His eyes were like silver dollars. Yeah, I can’t believe I said that either.  The woman that works for him pulled us aside.
            She handed me the ring, and told Lisa that she should not pay a bill if she received one.  She apologized, and said she went back and found the ring.  It went through the cremation process.  It only survived the heat because it was made of titanium.  All the precious gold had boiled out of it, and the once shiny titanium was now charred and blackened.  That was the second time I held that wedding band.  The first time was at their wedding, when I held them both high with the wedding liturgy that says, “These rings are the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace…”  Now, I held the ring again.  We walked outside.  No one checked for the ring. They burned it. I was shocked.
            “That was some gangster shit, Ford,” Lisa said.
            “What?” I asked.
            “You just threatened to kick a guy’s ass on main street.”
            “Sorry about that,” I saw her watery eyes.  I am not touchy-feely, but I reached down and held her hand, making sure that the wedding band was between our palms.”
            “I didn’t expect that from a pastor,” she said.
            “I hear that from time to time,” I said, pressing the ring into her hand so she grasped it as we neared my truck.
            “You were supposed to keep me from getting mad!” she said.
Months later, Mike Leaman, Cody Mathis, and I held a small ceremony in one of Andy’s favorite hunting spots.  We put his ashes, as requested by Lisa, where we had just hunted and shot some hare.  It just occurred to me recently, that the gold, forged in the blast furnace of a star, and boiled out of the wedding band by a crematorium, must have been mixed into those ashes, in tiny flakes.  “Ashes to ashes and dust to dust,” as the liturgy says.  Stardust.

​One of the recent changes in my hunting season over the last few years has been the addition of Christmas Eve to the days when I can hunt.  When I was a kid, way back in the 1900s, rabbit season ended after Thanksgiving, and did not return until after Christmas.  We now can hunt after Turkey Day but before Christmas, from the end of the rifle deer season through Christmas Eve, and then hare season starts the day after Christmas.  Christmas Eve hunting, you have to understand, was never a holiday tradition in my family. It was Illegal back then.  I have to say, it has become one for me.
If you don’t know me, I can tell you that I am prone to being absent minded.  I have walked around the office looking for keys that were in my hand.  I never know where a coffee cup might turn up—I am notorious for putting them on high, flat surfaces to keep the dogs from stealing a lick or two. As a pastor, I am always losing my vehicle in hospital parking garages and parking lots.  I once rushed from a hunt directly to a hospital to see a church member who had been in a car accident.  I was wearing bibs and wool.When I finished the visit, I wandered the hospital parking garage looking for my truck, going from one floor of the garage to the next.  A hospital employee found me trudging In my boots along the sloped floors of the parking decks.
“Can I help you?” He asked.
“I can’t find my truck,” I scratched my head, “I forget where I parked.”
“Oh,” he said, “Okay.  We thought you were a homeless guy casing out the place to rob an unlocked car.”
“What?”
“You looked like a homeless guy,” he pointed at me to make It clear.
“Oh, what does a homeless guy look like?” I asked.
“You here as a patient?” He asked.
“Nah, I was visiting a church member who was rushed here and I didn’t find out about the wreck until recently.”  I gave him the card that enables clergy to get free parking.
“You have a good day, Sir.”
Anyway, the point is that I lost my truck, and I have done it before then and since.  If you have ever been to Geisinger Hospital in Danville, Pennsylvania, then you have seen the largest parking lot I have ever seen.  They have a shuttle that loops around the expansive lot and then to the hospital entrance.  I rode that thing for a half hour to find my car one time.  My current Beagle Mobile has a rooftop tent, awning, and a massive rear bumper with storage cabinets.  I obviously have all those things to travel with dogs and be comfortable when I go to field trials to hunting trips.
“Why do you have all that stuff on your truck?” I was asked at a field trial.
“So I can find it in parking lots,” I answered.  I am forgetful.  I miss things in the news, and I can be out of touch with pop culture.
My first Christmas Eve hunt was with Andy Purnell, not many years before he died.  I had no idea that we were even allowed to hunt that day.
“You got church on Christmas Eve?” Andy asked me on the phone.
“Well,” I was sarcastic, “It Is Christmas Eve, what do you think?”
“But that stuff is all at night, right?”  He knew the answer to that question.  Many don’t know this, but Andy was an acolyte in The Episcopal Church as a kid.
“I am free till 7 o’clock,” I said, “What’s up?”
“Let’s rabbit hunt In the morning!” He said.
“We ain’t allowed,” I said.
“It has been rabbit hunting season since deer season ended!” I heard him laugh.
“Shut up!” I said.
“I’m telling you the truth,” Andy said, “But I can hear you typing to double check me.”
Sure enough, rabbit season had been expanded. “Well I’ll be,” I said.
“How do you not know this?” He said.
“Meh, I miss things.  My wife gets mad all the time when I do not notice haircuts that she gets.”
“I will meet you at 8 o’clock,” he said, “Let’s get breakfast at your place.”  That meant the restaurant close to my house, which has the best home fries in the entire world.  They also serve homemade pepper relish, which varies by batch but ranges anywhere from extraordinarily hot to a flavor just cooler than magma.  Yum.
“Alright,” I said.  This meeting place meant that we would hunt close to me, and use one of my spots.  Andy had lots of spots, and if I am honest he showed me more hunting holes than I ever showed him.  He carried his .410 pistol, and we walked into some pines.  A brush up  against the snow filled boughs had him emerge from a group of pines with his beard covered in snow, and he was puffing frantically to keep his pipe lit.  To be honest, he looked a bit like Santa Claus, If Santa  started jumping around and complaining about snow falling down his back while wearing an orange vest.
“That is cold!” Andy said.  The dogs started a rabbit and headed towards the bottom as we laughed at the snow fiasco and listened.  The chase was going great and we could not stop laughing at the sight of Andy trying to keep his pipe lit through the plop of snow,
“What were you doing off the road?” I laughed.  Everyone knew Andy wasn’t big for getting into the cover.
“I was turning my back to the wind and didn’t know I was that close to the trees,” he said, as as soon as he uttered the words he knew how he left himself wide open to an insult about his proclivity to shoot from dirt roads and starting laughing, “Ha ha ha!” he said.
I barely composed myself to talk through the laughing, “You accidentally left the path!” I wheezed, “And then your laugh was almost a Ho Ho Ho! That would have matched your white beard.” We walked over to watch the chase.
“That rabbit is gonna cross the spoil pile,” I said.
“You still got that sight hound in there to follow footprints In the snow, right?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“We will be fine,”
It then occurred to me that I had Christmas cookies in my pocket.  Good ones.  Church Lady cookies.  The kind that are made with club crackers and layers of butter and chocolate and other stuff.
“Say,” I cleared my throat, “Do you want some Christmas cookies?” I said to Andy as we stood on a steep bank, watching my dog take the front through the shale and dirt that was  covered with a coat of fresh  snow, using his eyes to see rabbit tracks.
“Hold this,” I handed Andy my shotgun as I rooted into my inner vest pocket to track down the zip top bag of snacks. “I gotta get Santa his cookies while he watches my dog work and lead his mutts through this coal mine.”  I snickered
He laughed as he grabbed my back with a big paw of a hand and kicked my legs out.  He eased my weight to the ground and pushed me down the steep bank towards the bottom where the dogs were chasing, “Don’t get my cookies wet!” He yelled as I slid about 30 yards down the hill.  “HO HO HO!”  Andy mocked me with a laugh as I rolled over to my stomach and looked uphill at him as I slid away.
It was Christmas Even and we were acting like little kids.  Did we shoot rabbits?  A couple.  We shot a couple.
“You bring the coffee?” He asked as we loaded dogs back into the truck.
“You know I did,” I said, grabbing my thermos, “Those cookies make you thirsty?”
“Yup.”
“I filled his travel mug 2/3 with coffee.  Andy always added about a half cup of that powdered coffee creamer.  French vanilla or hazelnut.  Maybe more than a half cup, as it obliterated the coffee taste entirely.  He carried a container of it in his glovebox! I have hunted Christmas Eve since then.  Some years we have snow, some years we do not. But I always think about my first Christmas Eve hunt with Andy, and then I go home and get ready for candlelight services at church.
My father and I made a ritual of hunting snowshoe hare on the day after Christmas, every year.  That was opening day for hare here in Pennsylvania, and not many guys knew where to find them back then.  I lived in the northern part of the state and could walk to a stand of hemlocks that was full of the white ghosts.  We frequently chased them, but the short season meant that we were only able to get a few each year.  By the time we could hunt them, I all but had them ready for the hunt, running them for months.  When you run the same hare all the time they get playful and almost don’t fear the dogs.  Like a beagle club bunny.  I was always so enthusiastic on the first day, and dad could see the excitement on my face.
“Relax, we will be there soon enough!” He said one year.
“Yeah, but there is this one hare that Is massive, you won’t believe it, and I know right where we have to stand to get him!”
And we did just that, and the hare was the biggest I have ever killed even to this day. And if we managed to get our daily limit of hare (2 per person per day, at that time) then we would relocate to a brushy bottom near a farm and try to get some cottontails too.  It was just what we did on the day after Christmas.  We hunted all day with our beagles.  It was my favorite day of the year, dad and I hunting on the 26th of December.  And while he never ate candy, for some reason dad brought peanut brittle to the woods for the start of every hare season.  We would eat rock hard peanut brittle while listening to the hare loop.  My life has pretty much gone to the dogs ever since then.
Last year I was hunting Christmas Eve on a piece of land a friend of mine owns.  I was putting the finishing touches on my sermon for that night, and thinking about Christmas.  How Christmas can make us sad, when loved ones have gone before us. I thought about those hunts with dad on the day after Christmas and the hunts with Andy on the day before Christmas, and the way that Christmas is a non hunting day sandwiched between my new tradition of hunting cottontails on the 24th and my older tradition of chasing hare on the 26th.  As the dogs chased that Christmas Eve cottontail last year, I grabbed a hatchet from my truck and cut down a small spruce tree to put in my house.  It was small enough to fit in a bucket, covered with a small tree skirt.  My wife has been a fan of artificial trees, especially since they invented those pre-lit ones. We had not had a real tree for a few years.  I decided that I would put this small spruce on a table in my office.
On that Christmas morning a year ago, I drank my coffee with the odors of that spruce filling the room.  It was in the pines where Andy pitched me down the spoil pile on my first Christmas Eve hunt.  It was in the hemlocks where dad and I spent our December 26th hunts.  That  little spruce seemed to do the trick to conjure both traditions, and both evergreen species, to the forefront of my memory.  While the rest of my family was seeping, I sat in my office with that tiny tree and had breakfast.  Oh, did I tell you that I stopped at the grocery store after cutting that tree down and bought some nasty French vanilla flavored powdered creamer and a small box of peanut brittle?  I poured the flavored powder into my coffee and grabbed a rock hard piece of brittle.  As daylight began to overtake the morning, I forced my nostalgia to stay in the dark, as my family began to stir and we prepared to commence with celebrating the light of the Christ child. Holidays can be tough, but we owe it to our beloved dead to continue with our lives.  We must make sure others have cherished memories and traditions, and that is somewhat dependent upon us.  Merry Christmas everyone, and keep ‘em running!

Sometimes, I fear I am becoming my father.  Now, I know what you think that means—that I do stuff like yell about the lights being on, get upset if people are wasting leftovers, or fill my gas tank when it gets down to half empty (It is not half full).  Oh, I do all those things.  Hey, I even tell my family that they do not have to turn the water off so abruptly, causing water hammer in the plumbing system, just like my dad would complain.  No, I am talking about a much different way that I am becoming like dad.  I just realized it recently.  Well, in the last couple months.
            I realized that social distancing has not been a hardship on me, at least in terms of my personal life.  When I was a kid, I used to say that my father didn’t seem to have friends, at least not ones that he “hung out” with on a regular basis.  “He is either at work, or he is with his family,” I said.
            “Everyone has a best friend,” my buddy said.
            “I don’t think he does.  And the friends he has are just guys from the beagle club.”
            “No one pops by the house?”
            “Yeah,” I said, “But only if they need something.  Other than relatives.  Now that I think about it, the relatives often only stop when they need something too.”
            “Okay, well he must get phone calls.  Whoever calls him the most often is his best friend,”
            “You are probably right,” I chuckled.
            “What is so funny?”
            “Overtime.  His most frequent call is overtime from the factory.”
            All these years later, I think that I am in the same boat.  I do not miss restaurants.  Even before all this coronavirus stuff, I usually packed a lunch.  I never know what my day will bring in terms of hospital visits.  I save money, and eat in my truck.  A thermos of soup in cold weather, or a sandwich in a cooler during the warmer months is my standard choice.  I never really went to stores that much anyway, that has always been my wife’s forte.  My dad never signed his paycheck or deposited it once, my mom always did that.  I may deposit my own checks, but I do that with my phone now.  Sometimes, I will give my debit card to my wife, Renee, when she goes to the store, but she makes more dough at the university than I make!  She does have trouble not being around people.  Renee is working from home, and I hear some of it.
            “I am tired about hearing you talk about Zoom and all the other web pages you can go to for online meetings,” I said to her as she closed her laptop, ending a meeting.”
            “They are platforms, not pages,” she looked over her glasses, in that bossy sort of way.
            “Whatever,” I said, “But every conversation you have with every co-worker is the same.”
            “They are colleagues.”
            “Okay.”
            “Do you even know what I do at the university?” she pushed her glasses up and looked through the lenses, trying to bait me into an answer.
            “Not really,” I said.  And I don’t, other than it is all online, and that is true even when she is in the office and her “colleagues” are all meeting in the same physical place.
            My work has been altered—I can not do hospital or nursing home visits.  Heck, I can’t do any visits.  I have substituted phone calls in place of driving to hospitals.  It goes pretty well, though, as you can imagine, it is tough on people who are older and suffering from hearing loss.  Hah, my hearing isn’t the best anymore either, so some pastoral care calls are just me and an older guy yelling at each other on the phone.  But a couple weeks into this whole mess, and I realized that I have to be at church on Sunday mornings, for our livestream church service, but otherwise, I could be anywhere during the week, so long as I could make cell phone calls to patients and tend to work stuff from afar.  Also, I could wear anything!  I ain’t talking about pajamas, I mean bibs and brush pants.
            Social distancing?  How could I possibly avoid people any more than if I went into the woods, and just stayed there?  I can just run some dogs, have some cookouts, and give my wife a break from the barking house dogs while she is having her online meetings. I will go afield for a couple days at a time, and as long as I can get a cell phone signal at the top of a hill, I am able to stay there.  I take the dogs and might run them as a pack one day, and take turns soloing them the next.  It makes for good time alone to think, and work on a weekly homily and provides a great place to work on any writing that I have to complete.  Over the years, I have been staying in the field with hounds more and more, but in recent weeks I have really been training hounds.  I thought I would share some things that make staying afield with dogs enjoyable, rather than uncomfortable.
            Rooftop tents are pretty commonly found with an internet search.  They vary in style and price.  I like a fiberglass top, which is why I have a Maggiolina.  You can mount it to the rooftop of a car or SUV.  With my pickup, which has a dog box in the bed, I use a ladder rack.  I like the fiberglass top because I have never gotten wet, no matter how hard it has rained upon me.  The tent bolts on the ladder rack, and I can drive anywhere with it—80 mph on the interstate, or an off-road crawl (it is only 130 pounds) into hunting spots.  In one minute, the tent can be raised, a ladder extended, and I can climb in and sleep on the mattress that is built into the tent itself.  The tent has paid for itself in the money it has saved me by not sleeping in hotels while on long road trips.  In fact, I sleep in this tent so much that it feels like home, and I now get to field trials the night before rather than waking up in the middle of the night to drive.
            Comfort goes beyond the tent.  In all those cowboy movies, the guys sleep on the ground, using a saddle for a pillow, and just a blanket.  Then, they wake up and move cattle all day.  Even when I am training dogs for a few days, I seldom let them run rabbits the entire day, but rather a few hours in the morning and a few hours in the evening is more typical.  What about the rest of the day?  It is good to have a comfy chair, some shade, and a place to sit and work in the rain.  They sell all kind of awnings for your 4x4.  I have a Foxwing that provides lots of shade for sitting under and also a place for the dogs to cool down.  It takes a few more minutes to deploy than the tent, but not much more.  It can be attached to a roof rack, or any other customized options, as I did for mine.  It can handle highway speeds when not deployed.
            My tent is comfortable, don’t get me wrong.  However, my best sleep of the day comes after I put some miles on the dogs at dawn, eat a late breakfast, and then take a nap before afternoon work, phone calls, and writing.  I own a camping hammock.  You can’t find a more comfortable “chair” if you try.  When I do camp remotely, I no longer carry a tent.  I use my hammock and use a tarp.  No need to worry about roots or rocks. Just find two trees, and set it up.  Shoot, If I am camping from the truck I can often get by with one tree, and attach the other side to my truck’s ladder rack.
            I kept my eye on a product, waiting for a good deal, because it isn’t typically cheap.  It is a tent that zips right onto the awning, called an Oztent.  Why did I want it?  It is perfect for two things—a screenhouse on those evenings when the mosquitoes (big enough to outdo any murder hornet in an aerial dogfight) are biting, and a dry place in a driving, windy, rain that would typically be catastrophic on my awning.  The tent anchors the awning fast to the ground in higher winds.  I like to run dogs until dark, and return to camp.  I can either rest in my hammock, or sit in a folding chair in the ground tent.  Weather is usually the determining factor.
            Storage is vital.  I have a bumper with swingout storage boxes that lets me pack a lot of gear.  I can fit a lot of clothing and a pillow in compression sacks.  I also use the storage boxes for tie out stakes, water bowls, and flashlights—I hate searching for all these necessities.  Hammer, tin shears, and a hatchet are there too. I use those boxes for anything that I know I will need and do not want to find in the perpetual pile of “stuff” in the back-seat row of my truck.  The bumper and boxes are light weight aluminum.  Aluminess is the company that makes them, and you can locate them online.
            My cargo hauler, inserted into the truck’s receiving hitch, is a beast.  It is made by Let’s Go Aero.  I can haul an array of comforts there—coolers, cooking gear, you name it.  Best thing?  It slides out.  Yep, I can slide the cargo basket back, allowing me to drop the tailgate no matter how full the hauler is.  This is key when you need to get to your dogs on a long trip to give them water, and alos let them water the local shrubbery.  I can then close the tailgate, push the cargo basket back into place, lock it down, and drive away.  It really is a game changer for long trips.  I also have a roof rack, and they all work well when used properly.
            Lastly, is power. Goal Zero makes lots of battery and solar panel options.  I have a Yeti 400, that I charge at home before I leave the house.  It makes small work of charging GPS tracking collars for the dogs.  Heck, in the interest of saving power, I have installed Microsoft Word on my cell phone, and use a battery powered keyboard that synchs up to my phone via Bluetooth.  That previous sentence just strained the limits of my tech language, but I can do a lot of writing on the power carried by that Yeti 400 when I am only charging a cell phone rather than a laptop.
            Just last week, I was out in the field and got a phone call from my wife. “Hello?” I answered.
            “Where have you been?”
            “Running dogs,” I said in a matter of fact fashion.
            “Your phone went right to voicemail,” Renee said, “I just got done on a Zoom meeting, but you wouldn’t know about Zoom.
            “I know plenty about Zoom,” I said.
            “What do you know?”
            “I just got great video of my 10 ½” tall beagle soloing a cottontail in really poor scent.  And she was zooming!”
            “Well,” Renee said, “Your phone was turned off, I have been trying to call you.”
            “My phone was on, I was using it.”
            “No, you were not talking.  It went straight to voicemail.  You could not have silenced it that fast,” Renee sighed.
            “I was recording video of the zooming,” I said, “I had the phone on airplane mode so no one could interrupt me.”
            “You figured out airplane mode?” she asked,
            “I was born for social distancing.  I am already at work, so overtime ain’t gonna call me,” I said.
            “What are you talking about?  You coming home soon?  You have been gone for days.”
            “Yeah, but only because it is not hunting season.  Or I might just stay out here….”
Zoom video at https://youtu.be/GfQ_b9g1ZG4
​

​Around here, in rural Pennsylvania. Quarantine often gets pronounced as “corn teen.”  And that isn’t the only linguistic anomaly here in the part of the state often maligned by outsiders by using the term Pennsyltucky. We drop Gs at the end of words, say “red up” to mean clean up, and say yinz as the second person plural.   Pennsyltucky is most of the state, everything except Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, and a couple smaller cities.  I like Kentucky and Pennsyltucky, so they can call us whatever they want.  My wife, Renee, is having a harder time than me.  She works full time at Penn State, and has been doing that from home lately.  She is a people person.  She is such a people person, that she thinks everyone else must be too.  One of the best things about corn teen is that I no longer have to blame the dogs for missing these play dates that she creates.
            I have always been the kind of guy that can run dogs by myself and hunt rabbits by myself and be happy doing that.  I have a few friends I hang out with once in a while, but I tend to find the social aspect of my vocation to be draining.  For instance, hospital and nursing home visits are very much the intentional insertion of a pastor into the difficult situations that people are facing, in order to help out.  When I go do a hospital visit, and see someone who is really sick, I find that to be a very draining process.  Don’t hear me saying that I do not like doing it, or that I avoid it.  No, I take this part of my job very seriously, but when it is done, I like to be able to retreat into my own solitude for renewal.  Maybe just me and the dogs in the field, or a quiet supper at home with my wife.
            Renee, by contrast, gains energy from being around people.  She can float like a butterfly in and out of conversations at a large gathering.  I will be in the corner talking to the other hunters and ignoring everyone else.  In non covid-19 times, she likes to think I need new friends and schedules these “play dates” where she makes reservations with her friends and their husbands to meet at a restaurant and engage in small talk over food.  Small talk isn’t my thing.  I often blame the dogs for missing these meals.
            “Sorry babe,” I call her on the phone when the dogs are chasing a rabbit right past me, so she can hear them.  “These dogs are just pounding the rabbit.  I lost track of time and now I am having trouble catching them.  I will be late, but I will make the supper.  What restaurant do I go to?”  At his point, I hope the pack doesn’t lose the rabbit and end the hound music, which is a big part of my cover for the excuse I am fabricating. 
            “Are you showing up in coveralls again?” she seethes.
            “I will put a shirt over top, so it looks like pants.”
            I usually arrive just in time to eat an appetizer as they are finishing up their main course, the dogs snooze in the dog box in the bed of my truck, as I make enough small talk to get me through the encounter.  It happens so much that her friends think I am some kind of professional trainer of beagles.  HA!
            In these corn teen times, I have been taking dogs afield twice per day, as doing visits is off limits.  I have been saving gas money by avoiding the beagle clubs and training dogs at my local hunting spots.  This also allows me to avoid the old timers who have been going to the beagle club a lot.  The last thing I want to do is pass this bug to them.  Restaurants have been closed, so we are eating at home all the time with no one else.  While listening to hound dog music, I contemplate a faith based offering that I can put on Facebook each day and generate ideas for our online worship services.  Hey, in some ways, this has been easy for me.  I take care of pastoral care by making a few phone calls to people each day.
            The other day the wind was howling and most of the state was under a tornado watch.  Rather than take dogs afield, I decided to play some hymns on my mountain dulcimer and work from home.  I did a little writing.  Then, I decided to work on converting insight from academic commentaries and publications about a bible passage into a sermon—something a little less dry than a commentary.  Some wit, a story or two to illustrate something intellectual, and a weekly research paper gets changed into a sermon. Maybe it isn’t much more interesting than the academic stuff, but hey, I try.  When I am working on a passage from home, my wife thinks that I am not working.
            “What are you doing?” Renee will ask.
            “Working,” I answer.
            “Ha!  Looks to me like you are laying on the couch and listening to music.”
            “I am thinking.”
            “Yeah, well come watch me and see what work really looks like!”
            Anyway, as the wind howled outside and the dogs were at attention anytime the screen door heaved against the doorknob latch, and the limbs from the trees in the yard shed twigs that were sent hurling into the house, I heard someone.  It was this pleasant, jovial, affable, accommodating voice coming from the kitchen.  She sounded so helpful.  My first thought was that we are supposed to be practicing social distancing and no one should be in the house—why do we have company?  My second thought was, how did this gal get into my house to see Renee without my beagle security system notifying me?  They bark at car doors 100 yards from the house, and had been barking at the wind all day.  How could this intruder get past them?  So, I walked into the kitchen to see who had dropped by.  It was Work Renee.
            Work Renee looks exactly like my wife.  Except she is kind, gracious, and always willing to help.  I have seen her be as patient as you can imagine when helping some tenured professor do something to convert a traditional classroom course into an online project.  Work Renee oozes compassion, and will explain the same thing four, five, even six times to a coworker.  What do you think happens to me if I cannot hear something she says and ask her to repeat it once?  I get the growl from Wife Renee, a very different person than Work Renee.
            Lately, during covid-19, Work Renee has been on the phone and the computer, working from home.  Her workload has doubled.  She expends this great burst of gracious, gregarious helpfulness, and when all civility has been drained from her at the end of her day, she transforms into my wife.  She has no sympathy then, when I can’t do very difficult things like find a particular pair of boots, locate something in the refrigerator, or remember the password to the internet.
            So, the best thing for me to do is get out of her way.  I wake her up in the morning, and make coffee.  Then, I load up hounds, and go to the woods.  I work on some little things that I can share with the congregation while we are not meeting, and return home.  I hear the pleasantness as she works, and then, around supper time, the transformation.  When her computer is turned off, her voice hardens.  Her vocabulary diminishes.  She breaks out a few words with just four letters.
            “Hey!” she yelled at me a few weeks into the corn teen, after supper.
            “Yes, sweetie?” I answered.
            “Is it just me, or are you wearing pajamas and bib coveralls and that is it?” Renee asked, in a tone that meant she was not happy.
            “Well,” I scratched my chin, “I think th--”
            “Stop touching your face!!”
            “Sorry,” I put my hands on my lap, “It isn’t pajamas or bibs.  It is either pajamas or bibs over pajamas.”
            “You’ve had the same pajamas on for days.”
            “Well, I am changing underwear and socks.”
            “That’s disgusting.”
            “Hey,” I said, “You put on a fancy shirt every day and do your makeup and hair, but you are totally in pajama bottoms for those online meetings that you are attending.”
            “They are different pajamas each day,” she sneered in that way she does to point out the obvious.
            “Prove it,” I said, “You have 20 pairs of grey yoga pants.”  Just then, her phone rang.
            “This is work!” she growled, “What do they want at this hour?”
            “I don’t know,” I said.
            She held her index finger up to me, indicating that I should be silent. “This is Renee,” she answered with kindness oozing from her voice. The transformation is faster than when Bruce Banner becomes The Hulk. I pulled some bibs over my jammies, pulled my boots on, and loaded a few dogs to go to the field.  Did the dogs I left at home get loud when they saw me break out the tracking collars and take a couple dogs out to the truck?  Oh, yeah.  Renee had to go into the back yard, on the phone, as I took dogs out the front door just so no one heard the protests of the older hounds I didn’t take. Old dogs run morning, youngsters in the evening.  Stay socially distant and spiritually connected during this time of corn teen.

​Well, here we are at the most romantic time of the year—Valentine’s Day.    In ancient, pr-Christian Rome, there was a festival that lasted from February 13-15 called Lupercalia.  They would sacrifice goats and a dog.  This was thought to purify the city, and bring health and fertility.  There was a big celebration of breastfeeding, much like you see when soccer moms gather in coffee shops today to talk about breastfeeding so loud that everyone knows that they had extracted a couple  pints of milk for the baby that they dropped off at daycare.
            Anyway, the ancient festival would also offer cakes as a sacrifice.  These cakes were made by a whole bunch of virgin women, called Vestal Virgins.  They remained virgins for 30 years, after being inducted at about the age of 10, and then they retired at the age of 40ish with a full pension.  It was considered a great honor to marry one of them, and noblemen would compete for the right..  So, after the animals were killed at the altar, two priests would then anoint their foreheads with blood left on the knife from the sacrifice.  That would then be washed away with a wool rag soaked in milk. These two priests would then laugh at each other, which must have been creepy.  Next, strips of the hide (they were called Februa, from which we get the word February) and these strips of goat hide would be carried by young men who ran naked in a circle around a hill.  They slapped people with those bloody strips, and this was thought to help women get pregnant or make pregnancy go well.  That was Lupercalia.  Later, we get Valentine’s Day, at the same time of year, which makes all of that stuff look somewhat normal.  Well, maybe not normal, but let’s face it, Valentine’s Day drives people crazy.
            Me, I try not to get too excited.  All you really need to do is send flowers.  If your wife works with other women, it is best to send the flowers there.  If she gets a bunch of them delivered in front of all the other gals, then you will have made a a good show.  It is also important to take her out to supper as well.  Here is how that is done best: make a reservation a few weeks in advance.  But make it for 8 o’clock.  When it comes time to take your wife for supper you simply say, “Whew, I really had to pull some strings to get reservations, but we have them.  Tonight at eight.”  My wife, Renee, then goes to work thrilled that I was able to get a reservation on such a busy day.  But, did you see what I did there?  Waiting until 8 o’clock means that I can hunt until dark!
            Alright, now that is a veteran move.  If you are a Newlywed, that may not work.  You will have to test the waters.  But once you have some years of service, you can get by with hunting a few hours in the afternoon and meeting her later.  I once officiated a wedding, and the gal that played the guitar for this outdoor wedding was really talented.  She writes her own songs, and sings.  She almost made it on TV for American Idol.  She just had to win one more contest or whatever it is called.  I don’t watch the show, but it was all over our local news.
            Anyway,, after I pronounced them as married, they kissed, and I sent the bride and groom marching down the outdoor aisle, which was a mowed path.  I looked to the musician, and indicated that she should play some sort of recessional music.  She launched into a very good cover, which she totally owned, and made it her  own.  She strummed a few chords, and I thought, “No” to myself, since I knew the song, but she did perform a fantastic rendition of Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues.”  I shrugged my shoulders, and enjoyed the song.
            “Sorry,” she said, “I do not know many love songs.”
            “Meh,” I answered.  Prison.  Marriage, They are both institutions and leave you institutionalized.”
            IF YOU ARE NOT INSTITUTIONALIZED, then you will not get away with hunting on Valentine’s Day.  Your wife needs to have other married friends for enough years that she realizes that spending time in the woods chasing rabbits is not the worst behavior that a man can display,  Let her hear about all the stuff her friends deal with.  Staying out late at night, chasing other women, that kind of stuff.  Once you have been married a dozen years or more, she will have no trouble with you going to the woods.
            “Say honey bunny,” I said last year on Valentine’s Day, “Since we aren’t able to eat the fancy steak dinner until 8 o’clock, would it be alright if I hunted the last couple hours of daylight?   I will  come home right after, wash up, and we can go eat.”
            “Yes, go ahead,” Renee said, “Oh, and I picked up those .410 shells that were on sale at the mall.  I was looking for gloves, and saw the good price.  I put them on your desk.”
            “Well,” I said, “Happy Valentine’s Day to me.”  That, my friends, is fully institutionalized.  She went to work and got flowers.  Am I saying that I pulled one over on Renee?  Nah, she probably knows.  February 14 isn’t the only day that I hunt the last hour of daylight.  I do it quite a bit.  And there are some things that you can do to help out even more.  When we first married, my refrigerator wasn’t domestic.  It was mostly mustards and hot sauce.  Maybe 5 of each.  And the fishing bait was on the top shelf (hey, the bottom was too cold).  That was in September, when we married.  In the fall, she come home to a common sight—dead rabbits soaking in a little saltwater.  Yep, right there on the top shelf.  All these years later it is no trouble now, but when we first married she wasn’t fond of the sight.  Especially if it was a great day afield, and I had her favorite Tupperware container filled with rabbit meat, right where she could see it.  What was my solution?  I bought a dorm fridge advertised as being for sale, in May, when the college kids went home.  I got my own fridge for bait and bunnies—and it was viewed as the kindest thing I could have done.
            Here is the last thing that makes the day go well.  You have to get one of those blank cards.  There’s a bunch in my house, because Renee went through a phase where she was making homemade cards for people.  For all occasions.  Congratulation cards for any achievement, get well cards, birthday cards (of course) graduation cards, and many more.  In case your wife doesn’t make cards, it is basically an art project that takes 4 hours, and Lord knows how much paper, glue, glitter, stamps, and stickers.  There is no cost savings, as I believe each card has a minimum of $10 worth of materials.  All the glue and glitter means that it will be cheaper to put the thing in a priority mail envelope than to pay for regular stamps.They are way too heavy for one stamp.
            Don’t worry about the glitter or anything.  Just get a blank card, and then wrote your own Valentine.  It doesn’t have to be that good.  It doesn’t have to rhyme.  It is. However, one of those things where quantity matter as much as quality. I just wrote all the things that Renee does to make me happy. Sometimes you have to start thinking about these things the day before to get a long enough list. Tiny things work. “You make the best pie” is okay. She is always noticing the tiny things.  Good and bad,
            See, and here is the thing, when 5 o’clock rolls around and it is time to be getting hungry, she will be home waiting while you are finishing up the hunt.  When you leave for the hunt, you have to leave this card where she will find it.  She will be delighted.  This then lets you be a little late getting home, if you hunted a good spot a bit further from home.  Leave the card with one fancy chocolate bar.  One candy bar is good—you buy the biggest box of candy you can find, and she will think you are calling her heavy.  One.  Expensive.  Chocolate.  That is it.  She will eat it while reading the card.
            I was sharing all this with a young man recently, who got married this past summer.
            “Man,” he said, “How did you learn all that?”
            In my best imitation of Morgan Freerman, from Shawshank Redemption, I said “Young man, I have been thoroughly institutionalized.  And it ain’t all bad.”

​I am seeing a little color in the trees, and hunting season is use around the corner.  The summer has been dry, and in my experience that is good for cottontails.  Naturally, dry weather isn’t as optimal for hare.  Wet springs and summers can be bad for cottontails, which have their young right on the ground, sometimes in the open. In lowlands, an all day rain can fill the small depression where newborn rabbits are nested with hair that the mother pulls out of her own coat.  It is no secret that I am not thrilled about cutting grass, and in my neck of the woods, July and August were months of  very infrequent mowing.  I have neighbors who roll their lawn, aerate it, add fertilizer, plant expensive grass seed, and even irrigate their yards.  Me?  I mow it when it is wet, letting the clumps smother future growth.  As a result, my lawn is populated by the hardiest of plants—weeds.  Oh, I have Queen Anne’s Lace, stinging nettles, and even burdock.  I know people that sow expensive grass seed, my dogs drop burdock in the yard that they collect while hunting.  When it gets as dry as we were over the late summer, then I have the only green lawn in town. We were under a drought warning and watering lawns was strictly forbidden.  My green lawn looks great from the road, where you pass it at 35 mph and do not realize that it is a well groomed lot of weeds with a little grass and clover mixed in.
            Lately, since the beginning of this month, the arrival of meteorological autumn, the grass has greened up, and my bumper crop of crabgrass and buckhorn plantain goes nuts, and I am busy in the field with the dogs.  The weather has cooled, and we have experienced the return of morning dew.  I love morning dew, and it can make an average dog look great!  Lately, I have been getting some screaming fast chases on morning dew in a big sorghum field on a farm.  The rabbits are found in the nearby thickets, and then they burst into the sorghum and proceed to run circles that are shaped more like mazes and Hebrew letters.  I was listening to the hounds run a big cottontail in the shape of a series of adjacent lameds, the Hebrew name for the letter that makes the sound of an L. Lamed is the last letter in ketal, the word for dew.  I started thinking of Psalm 133:3 “It is like the dew of Hermon, which falls on the mountains of Zion. For there, the Lord ordered his blessing, life forevermore.” Zion was a small hill in comparison to Mount Hermon, which is over 9,000 feet in elevation and is often snow covered.  Meltwater forms the beginnings of The Jordan River.  The verse reflects an idea that dew, often the only moisture in ancient Israel, must have dropped off the mountain, under the cover off darkness, and then covered the land with life giving water.  This is how they explained how water shows up without rain. Today, we talk about thermodynamics and the formation of water droplets through condensation, but I think the psalm is much more poetic.
            Lamed is the tallest letter in the Hebrew Alphabet, and is shaped like a shepherd’s staff, and the word lamed means to goad, like using a staff to move livestock.  I watched this rabbit zigzagging in overlapping lameds, running through dew drenched sorghum, and the dogs were absolutely locked on to the scent, as the wet crop held the scent, allowing the hounds to run with their heads held high.  Oh, don’t get me wrong, I enjoy watching good hound work, when dogs are able to solve tricks that the rabbit makes to fool the hounds and cease the chase in tough scenting conditions.  I appreciate a big nosed dog, solving olfactory riddles and sorting through the labyrinthine changes that a rabbit will make in order to optimize its chances of eluding pursuers by seeking dirt, gravel, rocks, and bare ground in the driest of conditions.  I really do like those chases, but I like a good driving chase even better, at least for the music!  This particular rabbit made his way to the end of the field and burst into the goldenrod of an adjacent property (did I mention I have some of that in my yard too?) and that resulted in big circles that looked more like rounded of squares.
            There is just something magical about dew.  I can’t say enough about it, when it comes to making things right!  Oh, and after those dogs have been chasing in the heat for months, this dew makes it look like their noses are attached to the rabbit by an invisible string, and almost all of the chases will be long, until the rabbit decides that it is in his best interest to take this endeavor to the subterranean realm, and hide out until the dogs have left. That can even be risky, I have a small dog that can get in there pretty far, too far for my liking.
            “Where are my boots?” I asked my wife, Renee, one night?”
            “You are kidding right?” She asked.
            “No.”
            “Oh, okay,” she sighed and moved her hands to her hips.  Never a good sign. “Well, you have a pair on the floor in the middle of the kitchen, another in the bathroom next to the tub, there’s a pair in the trunk of my car, I do not know why, there are three pairs in the closet where all the others should be, and there are two pairs beside the hamper.”
            “There’s a pair in your car?” I asked.
            “Yes.”
            “Are they my rubber boots?”
            “Yes,” she said.
            “I wonder how those got in there?” I asked.
            “Well, a few months ago you took my car to run dogs a few mornings when you were driving someplace far away.  You were scouting for rabbits at a place you drove by after leaving a cemetery for a funeral. Or something like that.”
            “Oh yeah,” I said, “That was back when we had dew, deforestation the heat wave! Are they in the car, where?”
            “Follow your nose,” she said.
            “I am not a beagle,” I replied.
            “You don’t have to be.  That’s a stink that no one can go ‘nose blind to.  I was driving somewhere and had to stop and move them to the trunk to avoid the stench.  I ordered groceries for pick up at the grocery store, the poor kid almost fell over when he put the groceries in there.”  Covid has ushered in drive through grocery pick up at the local market.
            “Really?” I asked.
            “I told you to get them out of there, and that I wa            sn’t going to touch them!  That was 4 days ago.”
            “I don’t remember that,” I scratched my chin.
            “Probably because you were too busy fussing with your tracking collars.”
            “Oh yeah, I had to get some crud out of the area where the collar slides into the transmitter. I need to get those boots, the dew has returned, and my other boots are waterproof but the moisture is hard on the leather.
            “Good,” Renee said, “And while you are at it, get those boots by the hamper put away too.”
            “I don’t know where the hamper is,” I said.
            “I guess that explains the blob of dirty clothes I keep finding in the bathroom closet,” Renee said, “Just get the boots out of the bedroom.”
            “Okay,” I said.
            I have been sloshing in dew ever since.  The only thing better is frost.  Oh, I love a good frost which is frozen dew.  When it begins to thaw and steam and the cool air makes for high scent and lots of great chases, with no need to worry about the dogs getting too warm. I better get those insulated boots ready too, thinking of frost.  I will wait a few days before I ask Renee where I put them.  My rubber boots had a pair of wet socks in them, which happened when I took off my boots to drive and then stepped out of her car before putting my shoes on.  I just threw those socks into the boots and then put my shoes on.  Whew, a few months in the trunk really ripened them up.  No matter, autumn is here.  Some see it has the harbinger of winter, but I see fall as the last climactic rush of summer.  Beautiful foliage, hunting of all kinds, lower temperatures, and that good old dew that coats the ground here in the Appalachian Mountains.  Dew is a blessing, like the psalms say, and hunting season is just around the corner.

​The month of July has been brutally hot here in Pennsylvania.  More than that, we have now reached almost five months of my wife, Renee, working from home, due to her office at the university being closed to the coronavirus.  She is online all day, and that tends to not like certain disturbances.  What kind of disturbances?  Well, for one, barking beagles.
            “Yes,” Renee says in her work voice to a gaggle of coworkers crammed into a zoom meeting, “I think we can install that module to the curriculum without too much diffi—”
            “Baroo! Howl! AWWWW!” the beagles interrupt her as they notice someone walking their dog past our house.  The dogs take turns, like sentinels on the wall at Guantanamo, perched on the back of the couch with their heads under the window blinds.  When an on duty beagle notices any violators—dog walkers, joggers, bicyclists, mailman, UPS, FedEx, neighbor coming home, neighbor leaving, squirrel (high alert) rabbit (red hot alert) bird, or a leaf blowing in the wind—he or she will then, as the on duty sentry, sound the alarm.  It takes about .2 seconds for the rest of the pack to start barking as well.  This has happened so much in this hot weather that my wife can react in .3 seconds.  She mutes her zoom meeting, then yells, not in her pleasant work voice, but in her marital voice, “Will you shut those blanking beagles up!?  I am in a meeting!”
            That is when I spring into action to get them calmed and quiet.  I yell at them, or distribute the dust.  What dust?  Well, I pulverize milk bones now.  This is what I have been reduced to doing with my wife at home all day in meetings that need quiet, and me being stuck at home working from the phone.  It is bad enough that she has to but a fake background behind her, so that no one sees the random beagle bouncing through the background.  I like the miniature Milk Bones, but they are in short supply, as well as everything else.  The massive Milk Bones, made for giant dogs, are always around and seemingly always on sale somewhere.  I put a bunch of them on a towel, cover them with another towel, and pulverize them into near dust with a hammer.  This, as you can imagine, makes a bit of noise, so it has to happen at night, after the meetings.  Once pulverized with a hammer, I smash them further with an old woods dowel, rolling it over them.  The dust goes into a plastic container.
            When my lowly mutts shut down online higher learning, I spread a palm full of dust on the kitchen floor.  It takes them awhile to find it all, and they normally forget what they were barking at.  A new duo of sentries takes a watch.  This happens several times per day.  The real problem has been the high heat, and the fact that it has been in the 90s during the day and only cools off to 70 or so by dawn.  Oh, and the bulk of my job, hospital and nursing home visits, has been cancelled.  I have a Regal dog box with fantastic insulation against heat and cold, and I would typically load those dogs up in the morning, run them for a few hours, and then go to work.  They stay cool in the dog box, travelling from one hospital to the next during the work day.
            “Are they worse than usual?” Renee asked?
            “Oh yeah,” I answered, “Way worse.”
            “Can’t you do something?” Renee switched from her marital voice to her work voice.
            “They need some time on rabbits,” I said, “It has been over a week.”
            “What do you do about that?” she asked
            “You won’t believe me.”
            “Why?” she asked, “Is it illegal?”
            “No,” I said, “Just weird.”
            “What is it?”
            I grabbed my phone and opened one of my weather apps.  I have a few of them. “See this,” I said, pointing at a blob of red in Ohio.
            “Yeah,” she said, “You driving to Ohio?”
            “No,” I said, “But Ohio might come here.”
            “What?”
            “I may not use computers as much as you, but I have a few things that I have figured out.”
            “Forecasting the weather?”
            “Nope,” I said, “But close.  You know those guys that drive vans into storms, looking for the tornadoes?”
            “Yeah,” she looked at me.
            “Well, when I see rain coming, I try to get there about a half hour before the rain starts, and the rainfall will keep the dogs cooled down.  Depending on the rain, I can get a pretty long run.”
            “How long have you been doing this?” she asked me.
            “Years.”
            “Is it dangerous?”
            “Nah, if it rains too hard, I sit in the truck.”
            “It works?”
            “When it rains, which it hasn’t done lately.  One day, last year, I ran dogs in the morning at Beechton Beagle Club before it got hot.  Did visits at the nearby Dubois Hospital, then went to Mountain Laurel nursing home.  After that I had to go to Williamsport Hospital. When I left the hospital, I saw rain coming, and got the dogs dropped at West Branch Beagle Club before the storm started, they got another good chase.  Two clubs in one day.  That’s rare.”
            “I am impressed,” my wife said, “Here I thought you were not good with technology.”
            “I ain’t very good, but I can see where rain is going,” I said.
            “Oh Yeah?”
            “You don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”
            “Who said that?”
            “Dylan.  But it is true.”  The Ohio rain never made it this far.
            A day later, I heard the work voice coming from the kitchen.  I mean, home office. “Get in here, please!”  I have to admit, I was perplexed.  Yeah, we had two squirrels and a UPS lady already, but at the moment the beagles were sedate, most of them sprawling themselves on the cold linoleum in the home office.
            “Now what?” I said.
            “Look at this radar!”
            “Let me see,” I said.
            “What do you think?” she said, her bottom lip quivering as she looked at the dogs, fearing they would erupt again.
            “Are you in a meeting?” I asked.
            “I am logged in,” she stared at the radar, “I don’t have to talk, I can hear them with my ear buds.  My wife has these massive, ugly ear buds.  They look like some of her earrings, so I often don’t realize they are ear buds with her hair down.
            “You know that spot where I went hunting when the guys from Outdoor Life came to town?” I asked her.
            “I think I can get there before the rain if I leave right now.”
            “Here are your tracking collars, I took them off the charger and put them into the duffel bag.  Don’t hurry home.”
            “I guess I am a storm chaser,” I said.
            “More like Rain Man,” the marital voice was back.

​When I was a youngster there was a chunk of the year when it was illegal to train dogs in the wild.  It lasted from spring into part of the summer.  For some reason April through June sounds plausible, though I am not sure.  Currently, we can train all year in the wild, as science has demonstrated that a baying beagle is a lesser threat to baby rabbits than weasels, hawks, owls, bobcat, fishers, fox, snakes, crows, or even lawn mowers.  Certainly, the game commission could reinstate a prohibition on training in the wild at any time.  Loss of habitat, in my opinion, is one of the biggest threats to all game species, as strip malls, housing developments, and roads appear as quickly as mushrooms after a rain.  It seems like I lose rabbit spots every year to progress.
            Running in the wild was a great joy for me as a kid.  This was because in my adolescent years, before I could drive, it was very easy for me to walk a couple hundred yards and be in an area that held bunnies.  This was an especially great thing in the summer, when I wanted to train dogs and listen to the hound music.  It was in July, perhaps, that we could return to the wild if we so desired.  Naturally, there were beaglers that preferred to run inside the fence all year.  The irony of that peculiarity was that most of the guys that wanted to run inside the fence all year had very slow dogs that could never go missing.  Perhaps the concern was also related to the fact that these were guys that found rabbits for their dogs.  Even today, I see gundog brace trials where the shaggers (guys with sticks to shag rabbits out of the brush) are as important as the dogs, and the judges sometimes have to stop walking so as to not pass the beagles.  I know people who never hunt with their field trial dogs, preferring to keep them in an enclosure.
            Anyway, late summer is a hot time of year, and it makes it difficult on the dogs.  Night running was more common then, as the coyotes did not own the woods after dark as they now do.  Incidentally, the Pennsylvania Game Commission printed a study in the book of laws that accompanies your purchase of a hunting license a few years ago detailing that the eastern coyote is larger and stronger than the western coyote, and therefore eats a larger percentage of deer.  The reason for this increased size is that the eastern coyote is a result of migration, wherein the western coyote arrived hear via the Great Lakes region, and interbred with wolves.  Our yotes have a sizeable percentage of wolf DNA.
            When I was a teenager, our biggest night time worries were skunks and porcupines.  My father would let me stay out all night long in the woods, and only imposed a summertime curfew if I went in to town.  I knew that if I violated this trust, I would be in big trouble and may not be allowed to go out in the woods for a long time.
            “Dad,” I said one morning after he had his coffee, “Can I take the dogs out tonight to run them.”  I never asked him anything before coffee. 
            “Why?”
            “Because its hot now,” I held out a thumb, “And we can run in the wild again,” I held out my index finger to count my second strong point.
            “How you going to get to wherever you plan to do this?  I am working second trick today,” he scratched his stubble.  Trick, in this case, was interchangeable for shift.
            “I am going to walk,” I said.  I could tell he knew my intentions right away.
            “You plan on running a hare?” he grinned.  It was a facial expression that combined an appreciation for my plan with a heavy dose of skepticism.
            “Yep,” I said, “They won’t go in a hole. And they go in huge circles.  The dogs will fly!”
            “You better get there before dark,” he sighed, “Because those hemlocks have as many deer as they do snowshoes.  You will want to know what you are chasing before the sun sets.”
            Training collars and GPS were not even close to being used in the beagling world then.  We used compasses to get around in the big woods, and it wasn’t uncommon to come out of the hemlocks onto a dirt logging road that you had to walk for a mile or so until you saw a landmark that helped you determine where you were. Getting lost could easily happen.  I had an old coon hunting light that I planned on using, the helmet barely adjusted small enough to fit.  An old lensatic compass was my guide into the timber.
            Modern hunting is different.  For instance, last fall I was catching dogs at dark in Maine, a place where getting lost is a much more serious issue.  I had to work very hard to trust my handheld GPS.  It was telling me that my truck was parked 90 degrees off from where I felt it was positioned.  Oh, it was a half mile away too.  For reasons that I cannot explain, I trust a compass more than the communication between my handheld and the satellites.  I had to resist the urge to trust my instincts rather than my technology, I got my compass out and confirmed that the blasted machine was right.  Of course it was correct, and it even compensated for the angle of declination that demarcated the difference between true north and magnetic north.  So, off through the cedars I went, struggling to keep the leashed dogs from getting entangled in the ubiquitous, identical cedar trees, each ten inches in diameter.  This was the forest that replaced the last clear cut—perfect habitat for hare.
            I digressed.  Let’s go back to Pennsylvania in the 1980’s. I was using a compass and a second hand coon lamp with a battery that attached to my belt, or should have.  The battery may as well have been from a Buick it was so heavy.  An older gentleman that retired from hunting gave it to me.  I cut his grass every week and I saw the relic in his garage.
            “Jay,” I asked, “Can I buy that light?”
            “I thought you had beagles,” he poked the light with his cane.
            “I do, but that could be handy,” I said.
            “If you can pick it up, you can have it.”
            It was heavy, and I wondered if many other kids had attempted to lift it, but failed like so many that tried to pull Excalibur from the stone in the King Arthur stories.  “I got it,” I moaned, pretending that it wasn’t too heavy. “Thanks.”
            “You better get some suspenders for that thing.  Take this adapter I made to charge it.”  Jay worked for Ford Motor Company in Buffalo before retiring and returning to Pennsylvania.  He could build and design all sorts of things.
            Suspenders were no help, as the battery was pulling my britches to the ground.  I used a backpack to throw the battery into, and I am still not entirely certain that he did not build that thing.  The charge seemed to last forever.  The only drawback was that I had to carry a lot of water to stay hydrated from lugging the massive thing up and down the hills of the Alleghenies.
            I can’t describe to you how wonderful the chases were.  Those two beagles thundered through the hills, and the only time I had trouble was if they got onto a cottontail that ran close to houses.  People tended to not like the barking at midnight.  At least three nights each week I would do this.  I came through the door one morning at 7:15 or so, just as dad was coming home from work.  He was working third “trick” that week.  We had a little breakfast together and chatted about our night.
            “I was busy,” dad said, “We were a man short and we had to hustle.”
            “Dogs crossed the creek,” I said, “I got soaked crossing it.  Real soft bottom, I sunk knee deep.”
            “You sure it wasn’t the weight from that contraption on your back?  I think that battery is tearing the seams of your backpack.”
            “You might be right,” I said.
            “The seams on your pant legs are not doing well either.”
            “Yeah,” I poured some juice, “My legs are a lot bigger from that backpack battery.”  My mother shook her head as to indicate that sanity was sorely lacking.
            I look back at all of this amazed that I was allowed in the woods, alone, all night long at the age of 15.  I was instructed to avoid people if I saw them, which I never did see.  Then it happened.  My light burned out.  Of course, it was the bulb.  The battery could probably have powered a small village for a week.  I felt my feet wanting to run north, and get back home. But I remembered what I was told weeks before when this hare chasing began.  If you run out of light, build a fire and sit still until the sun comes up.  I caught the dogs in the dark—not easy as all I had was a small flashlight in my backpack.  I tied the leashes to trees, and built a fire.  I won’t lie, I was a little scared, and for some reason I would have felt safer if I was walking rather than standing still and sitting by the fire.  Tiny critters in the brush sounded like monstrous bears, and screeching owls made me think panthers were surrounding me.
            Catching the dogs in the dark was a disorienting process, and as the pre-dawn sky brightened I realized I was closer to my cousin Ray’s house than I was my own.  I trod up to his house and sat on the porch until the kitchen light came on.  Then I went inside for breakfast and called home.
            “Yeah,” dad answered.
            “Light burned out, I am at Ray’s house.  Can you come get me?”
            “I’ll take you!” Ray yelled.
            “Never mind, I got a ride,” I said.
“Okay.  See you later,” dad hung up.
Back here in the present, I hear coyotes all the time now, and if I am running dogs after dark it is accidental.  That was one glorious summer of running, and the cooler temperatures after dark were fantastic for conditioning the dogs.  The following rabbit season was the best I had ever experienced to that point in my life.  I never did have another great summer of chasing hare at night with such regularity.  I was 16 years old the next summer, and hanging out with girls seemed to make more sense.  I am still thankful for a father that let me roam those hills.  Happy Father’s Day.